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Quote Cuisine
"I love background," Wittmann says of his time in the McCain campaign. "Background is hilarious. A lot of journalists liked to call me on background because then they could have a Republican staffer saying heterodox things."
(By Michael Robinson-chavez -- The Washington Post)
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It wasn't much of a quote, really. Nobody who read it would have guessed that it was the first of thousands of quotes in the career of a future Hall of Famer. But who remembers Nolan Ryan's first strikeout or Michael Jordan's first basket?
The Pithy Pinnacle
In 1988, Marshall Wittmann founded "Jews for George" and sure enough George H.W. Bush was elected president.
In 1989, Wittmann was rewarded with a job as deputy assistant secretary of Health and Human Services. The ex-Trotskyite neocon was now a government official, learning valuable lessons on how to survive in the bureaucracy.
"The key is to always walk with a piece of paper in your hand," he says, "and always walk fast, even if you're just going to the bathroom. Walk fast, carry a piece of paper and look harried. And when people ask what you're doing, say, ' Arrrgh! I've got so much going on! I'm over whelmed !' That way, people won't ask you to do things."
His job was to serve as liaison between HHS and social conservatives who were lobbying the department to tighten restrictions on abortion. Perhaps by osmosis, Wittmann had become antiabortion himself, and he found the job "worthwhile and interesting."
But Bush lost in 1992 and Wittmann was out of a job. By then, he had a young son and his wife was pregnant with their daughter. He was desperate to find work and when he heard that Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition was hiring, he thought, " Hmmm, a Jew goes to the Christian Coalition, that might be interesting."
He was savvy enough to figure that the Christian Coalition might want to hire a Jew just to show it wasn't bigoted. He wrote to Ralph Reed, the group's executive director, and asked for a job. Reed took him to lunch at Bullfeathers and hired him.
"I said, 'Great!' " Wittmann recalls. "And then I thought, 'Oh, God, now I have to tell my wife.' "
She wasn't thrilled. Neither were the other members of their liberal Jewish families.
"She never told people I worked for the Christian Coalition. She told them I was a political consultant," Wittmann says. "It became a big issue with the family. Nobody felt too comfortable with it."
But the job was fascinating and it put Wittmann in the middle of the Republican revolution that seized control of Congress in 1995. He also got to attend a lot of Christian church services.
"I kinda liked the speaking in tongues," he says. "I've always wanted to do that in a meeting some day."
